We are going to change our database character set from WE8ISO8859P1 to AL32UTF8. We know that this could cause problems related to performance or disk space because we will change from a single-byte to a multibyte encoding.We have an Oracle 10g database.

Is there any other restriction or problem? For example: using Oracle Text or other application?

Thank you

SteveC

Jul 17 2008, 11:48 AM

Ever see those messages about possible character loss when using the old export/import and the character sets are different between the server and database? An "a" with an umlaut can turn into a regular "a" and then the meaning or context of a word can change. Then there is client versus server compatibility, and set/superset of the character set to consider. Those are some issues you need to investigate ahead of time, definitely check out the globalization guide.